Jim Killock’s Green Party blog

I think this is fantastic - thanks to Shroom Studios, the animators, and our creative and production team.

It’s not every year a political party produces something worth watching on t, but I think we have this year.

Here’s our video from Norwich; again showing Greens making a real difference.

This is the video we made in Kirklees (the slightly shorter version). I hope you like it - I think it is quite an inspiration. Very much counters the question of whether Greens are electable, and really shows what we do when we get the chance.

London’s campaign is now well underway, and the Green’s Siân Berry has established herself as one of the ‘four main candidates’. The Guardian compared the candidates to the Beatles yesterday, giving Siân a favourable review, as the most interesting, but rather slating the Lib Dems Paddick, claiming he is “hesitantly bringing up the rear as Ringo”.

Obviously from a political narrative point of view, Siân is doing well, getting great coverage and clearly making the Greens serious contenders in this election. And you can expect more and better things from the campaign in the next weeks.

The office here is running a very focused campaign than in previous years, with a team of volunteers and staff working in a much more dedicated way than in any recent Green party campaign that I can name.

Siân is of course an experienced campaigner, and that has led to some great photo ops, and no doubt will lead to more in the future. The team she is leading alongside Darren Johnson is delivering innovative and engaging politics – exactly what the Green Party is about. And hopefully, we’ll get a result to match.

Of course, a big part of that for London’s Greens is getting more members elected to the Assembly. With four votes to cast, and all the attention of the Mayoralty, that’s complicated to get across at times, but the extra scale of Siân’s campaign should lead to more votes and more Greens at the GLA.

The campaigns in general however I have to say are a bit lacklustre. Brian Paddick’s website and campaign is the most pedestrian, in my view. Ken’s does a bit better, and Boris’s website is perhaps the only one with any flair other than Siân’s.

Boris though is getting to known for his unpleasant views. Many Londoners are quite scared about the prospect of Boris. They have nothing to fear from Paddick, whose rambling late night blog posts are becoming legendary (has he nothing better to do?) but Boris is a worry.

This mop-haired buffoon is of course actually quite prepared to pepper his populism with what are actually quite racist comments, as with his promise to remove ‘political correctness’ from stop and search.

Similarly dismissing affordable housing targets as preventing affordable homes is just another way of suggesting we leave Londoners to the sharks.

I really don’t think that Boris or Paddick are the sort of choice Londoners want. That is what makes Siân, as a Green London Mayoral candidate so interesting: she actually posesses the qualities Londoners want in a representative, being on our level, pushing new ideas and having an aspiration for a human-scale city. Somehow that transcends what the others have to offer.

I’ve been to Norwich, Huddersfield and Brussels in the last fortnight, seeing some of our most successful Greens in action. A few of us the communications office have been filming looking at their very impressive achievements and campaigns.

My first stop was Huddersfield, where we took a look at what has been achieved by the Greens on Kirklees Council. It’s impressive to say the least. Cllr Andrew Cooper has persuaded the Council to install solar PV on about 100 council houses and flats, cutting residents bills. He’s also got them to build new affordable green homes. It’s a vision of what Britain could look like today.

Depressingly, though, what should be the norm is a huge exception, to the extent that the solar village’s residents are suffering ‘visitor fatigue’ as the great and the good repeatedly show up to tour the area.

Just as remarkable, not least for its lack of replication elsewhere, is the country’s first ever free insulation scheme. Kirklees is offering free cavity and loft insulation to literally anyone who wants it. Teams are touring every street to make people aware and then get the fitters out to homes. This will cut bills by over £100 per household a year, putting money back into the local economy as well as saving carbon.

I got a similar impression of originality and vitality from the Norwich greens. Although they have only recently started to wield the sort of influence that Andy Cooper has, they are starting to pressure the Council to make big changes. Having got them to adopt an ambitious target for cuts in carbon, Norwich City Council will now have to think about what they do with buses, cars and energy. Norwich Greens have also be prominent in protecting local shops, trains and amenities, being a real voice for the community there.

Caroline Lucas, of course, is our most high profile politician and seeing her work for a day was fascinating. She’s working a vast brief, including climate emissions, aviation, trade, human rights and animal rights. She is a very accessible MEP and clearly making a difference in that institution: to make Europe work for its citizens we need to elect people like her, or we risk leaving the EU’s agenda to be set by corporate lobbyists.

It’s often easy to forget that Europe is producing vast amounts of legislation, not least because the press here just don’t care about the EU except when they can talk about straight bananas and schemes to ban Imperial measures.

Europe does enter the news  in other EU countries, such as Germany, however, and it might well be worth asking why we have a media and political culture that doesn’t want to face the fact that we are part of a multi-state Europe that needs democratic scrutiny.

You’ll see the videos in a few weeks on the Green Party’s Youtube channel.

Last Friday I had the pleasure of seeing what was for me a gentle reminder of the great idealism and tragedy of revolution.

The setting was somewhat bizarrely a Pet Shop Boys performance of their soundtrack to the Battleship Potemkin, with the BBC Symphonic Orchestra, live at the Barbican.

Making much of the future sounds of their electronica, they managed to bring the film into the present day, inasmuch as the artistry and power of the film were projected better for an accessible and contemporary sound track.

I was less convinced about the accompanying blurb, however. Apart from claiming that they were ‘open sourcing the revolution’ (copyrighted DVDs soon to be on sale) it did not for me make revolution a contemporary and personalisable event as they apparently intended. Rather, given the trajectory of Eisenstein’s career, I remembered how it all ended up, and how his youthful artistic and social idealism were betrayed by the momentum of idealism and revolution.

Of course, one cannot simply say that Marxism and Leninism automatically end up with the Gulag. But the “dictatorship of the proletariat” seems to me to hold the seeds of the decay in moral boundaries which led the Russian state in that direction. In Eisenstein’s case it led to a very sad end, essentially dying of worry after Stalin destroyed the film Ivan the Terrible Part III during shooting. It was expected to be a devastating attack on Stalin’s crimes, as was Part II, which was simply banned, although not destroyed.

Part II used the medieval technique of making a veiled attack on Stalin by criticising the dead parallel figure of Ivan - and went so far as to make this very explicit by portraying Ivan’s contemporaries using the same method of attack by staging a play about an ancient tyrant, much to Ivan’s ire.

Personally, the nature of Eisenstein’s propaganda efforts do not simply separate themselves as art or idealism. They weren’t ever intended to be, of course, although Eisenstein no doubt did not expect people to watch his films with the awareness that he was supporting a totalitarian tragedy.

To paraphrase the original inspiration of the Bolsheviks, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as ironic deconstruction.

The Observer today had an article detailing a poll which showed that people did not feel ready to make major lifestyle changes in order to deal with climate change. They are also becoming cynical about the taxation supposedly aimed at making us drive and fly less, seeing it as primarily tax raising. The article concluded that there was a build up of “green fatigue”, which could lead to a backlash over climate policy. This is something which Siân Berry among others in the Green Party has been warning about. As she says:

“[Other parties] want you to think climate change is your fault. They make it hard for you to be green, and then they make you feel guilty about it. They give you no help to make changes, and then penalise you when you don’t revolutionise your life.”

This is the key to the problem. People need to see leadership and they are not seeing it from today’s crop of politicians. Public concern over climate change has been higher than ever before for some time, but real changes in policy are needed before people can build greener ways of doing things into their daily lives.

It is politicians’ role to give us the tools to do the job. As eco-psychologist Kristina Murrin says elsewhere in the Observer, “about 20% of people respond immediately to rational arguments, about 20% cannot be moved with a tank, and about 60% need an alternative spelled out.”

We all need to feel part of the solution and we need to see a pattern of changes happening in society at large, rather than feeling that we are being asked to make small, isolated gestures (like changing our lightbulbs) that are out of proportion with the threat.

These requests from on high for personal changes in lifestyle are in stark contrast to the lack of change from government and industry which people instinctively know are much more important in dealing with this threat.

Hilary Benn in a comment piece next to the main Observer article goes on to say that political will is needed to deal with climate change. This type of observation from Benn makes me very angry. What he says is quite right, but Benn is Environment Minister in a government which has failed to show any real leadership on this issue, missing its own targets and making a complete mess of renewables policy, to name but two aspects of its ten year record. Simply put, Benn needs to stop telling us about the political will needed and exercise some of it.

For the rest of us, who don’t think Benn or the Tories are likely to show us some leadership rather than fine words, the answer is simpler: join the Green Party and help build it into a mass movement that can challenge this nonsense, and take and exercise political power to answer these very urgent challenges.

We’re nearing the decision by the government as to who they will use to run the census. US arms company Lockheed Martin (who are both involved in intelligence gathering and subject to the share-all-data-with-the-US-government Patriot Act) are one of the two main bidders. On Saturday, iPM on Radio 4 picked the story up, giving some really good coverage of the topic and to the role the Green Party has played pushing this very serious civil liberties and data protection issue. The Office of National Statistics do not sound very happy with the situation they find themselves in. If you haven’t signed the petition, this is a good time to do so, and circulate it to your local activist, peace and religious groups.

This Sunday Cameron invited the Greens and Lib Dems to a “progressive” alliance on devolution and local democracy, via his blog, but such is the depth of cynicism behind Cameron’s spin, he did not even bother to contact the Green Party direct in any way whatsoever. A gesture that failed to include the actual gesture - surely a first?

It goes without saying that we don’t think that the Tories are in any way “progressive”. Their approach to Green taxes, for instance, would shift tax to the poor while allowing the rich to carry on polluting. Their general approach to tax seems to be stuck in the 1980s mode of driving consumption to boost the economy – hardly anything to do with green politics.

Greenery is much more interesting to the Tories as a marketing tool. Interest in things environmental appears to place Cameron in the mode of a liberal politician, and while he avoids the substance he can ignore the harder choices – choices that a truly progressive politics needs to address, in order to make a Green future fair, tolerant and affordable.

For instance, think about how closely related expenditure and carbon usage are at present. The people leading the most ‘sustainable’ lives in Britain are actually people on low incomes, rather than green-inclined middle class people, and the people who are contributing most to our national carbon footprint are those whose lifestyles involve lots of foreign holidays, big cars and heating big houses. That’s the pattern that WWF found a few years ago. The obvious conclusion is that the super rich or ‘super consumers’ should probably just be taxed a bit more, and thereby asked to have more normal levels of carbon usage. But that’s an unlikely conclusion for a Tory, who would probably prefer to pretend that the super consumers will learn to have some social responsibility and invest their massive incomes in Green businesses perhaps.

Trying to help everyone be more responsible in their outlook on the planet also means enabling people on ordinary incomes to make greener choices. That means getting people to use smaller cars, or buses, or trains. That is likely to need state intervention to help regulate the industries or create the services, which to be frank I really don’t think the Tories have the political stomach for.

The Tories are just not likely to be a good vehicle for creating a Greener future. Even Labour or the Lib Dems, who have been equally inept on climate change and other key Green challenges like GM Foods, are more likely to be able to adapt to a renewed Green politics, as they lack the social and economic baggage of the Tories. That, perhaps, is why Greens on the continent have found it easier to work with parties of the left. I’d be inclined to bet that Cameron in government would be found quite quickly to be a fraud on Green issues, but it makes me somewhat depressed to think that, like Blair, it might then take a decade for the British people to get a chance to chuck him out again, thanks to our tortuous political system. It really is time for a different way of doing things.

Only a couple of days on from the vote, most of the party has begun to settle and I hope can see that this change does not mean a departure from our values of participation and internal democracy. In fact, the result if anything has been an enhancement of participation, with nearly half the membership voting – much higher than in many internal elections.

Electing a formal leadership will have important external ramifications. The most important of these is that the people with the titles will be taken more seriously, and as being strong embodiments of Green Party values. It will be important, therefore, to pick the right people. There is quite a choice out there, and I hope the election is contested by a range of candidates, most likely in the Autumn this year.

That will also create a big and positive media opportunity for us, if we get it right. Our Conferences sometimes get quite a lot of coverage, but at other times can be less well covered than we would we like. Part of this, I would say, is because our internal debates are of most interest to party activists, whereas who we elect as our leaders, and what they articulate about where the party wants to go, is hopefully going to be a matter of public interest.